And that is how the bureaucrats would have it. On Thursday I turned 53 and the phone rang, and on the other end was a voice from the past, someone I'd known well some decades ago, with the stated intention of wishing me happy birthday.

Full of himself as always--this from me--he prated on being quite pleased that, having worked twenty years for the Comptroller, he was now entitled to a pension.

Once in Austin some years ago I inflamed him by saying that the only time that I ever saw his fellow bureaucrats in a hurry was at noon and five o'clock. Heaven help him who was in the stairwell of the Stephen F. Austin State Office Building when it was time to go to Thundercloud Subs. One fat bureaucrat named Roger sighed with every step he took in the hall but when the lunch gong rang, it was like seeing the rolling boulder in the Indiana Jones movie.

Well, I feel good knowing that he and his coreligionists in taxation are vested in pensions after only twenty years, while I, their victim, have very nearly twice that much time on the job and I'm still in the process of saving up for mine.

If I could wave my hands and change any single thing, I would not choose a verifiable YouTube video of Hilldog eating a baby or Obama helping a Jeremiah Wright burn a flag. If I could issue one diktat I would impose term limits on every single worker in every single organization that we cannot fire, from the president down. It would be wonderfully clarifying to the bureaucratic mind to know that he would have to actually work some day and not be coddled by bosses with no need to show a profit or be any more responsive to the people who are meant to serve than they must. For if you believe in Darwin, anything that a government or any other monopolistic employee does of value for you is not directly related to his job performance but comes from the goodness of his heart. Which over time invariably becomes addled with the tender concern for himself that I've seen entirely too often.

Term limits for everyone.